Nº 06 — the darkroom
How any of this actually gets made.
People ask about the cameras. The cameras are the least interesting part. What matters is that everything here is shot on film, developed weeks late at a kitchen sink, printed exactly once on the same warm paper, and captioned in pencil before it dries. These are the notes.
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Step 01
Shoot slowly, and only once
One frame per subject. No brackets, no safety shot, no second angle "just in case". If it did not work, it does not go in — and the discipline of knowing that while you are standing there is the whole method.
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Step 02
Develop when I get home, not before
Rolls travel undeveloped, in a lead bag, sometimes for a month. There is a version of a trip that only exists in your memory, and I like meeting the real one much later, at a kitchen sink, in the dark.
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Step 03
Print once, on the warm stock
Every frame in this journal was printed on the same warm-tone paper, once, at 5×7. No second pass, no correcting a print I have already pinned up. The fade you see on this site is that paper, photographed.
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Step 04
Write the caption before the print dries
Four words, in pencil, on the border, while the thing is still wet and I still remember what the air was doing. Those are the captions under every photograph here. None have been rewritten.
Four stocks, and one shrug.
There is no system here worth copying. There is a shelf in a cold cupboard with four things on it, and a fifth pile of rolls whose labels came off years ago.
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Portra 400
Anything with a person in it
Forgives two stops of my bad guessing and still makes skin look like skin. Expensive enough that I think before the shutter, which is most of why it works.
C-41 · 35MM
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HP5 Plus
Rain, cities, arguments with weather
Pushed to 1600 more often than not. The grain that turns up at that speed is the reason half the Lisbon frames exist at all.
B&W · 35MM
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Ektar 100
Water, and nothing else
Too saturated for people, exactly right for glacial melt and Aegean shallows. One roll a year, used entirely in a fortnight.
C-41 · 120
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Whatever the shop had
The other third of the archive
Expired Superia from a petrol station outside Höfn. A roll of unlabelled slide film from a man in Marrakech who would not say what it was. Both developed. Both in the book.
UNKNOWN
if you take one thing
Take fewer photographs than you want to, and print the ones you keep.
A hard drive is not an archive, it is a deferral. Nothing on this site would exist if the frames had stayed as files. The moment a photograph is a physical object with a pencil caption on the border, you find out very quickly which ones were actually worth taking.
